Monday, May 09, 2011

Post-Bin Laden Peace Hopes Dim

By Gareth PorterMay 9, 2011

President Barack Obama and top administration officials have taken advantage of the killing of Osama bin Laden to establish a new narrative suggesting the event will pave the way for negotiations with the Taliban for peace in Afghanistan.

1 comment:

Gregory L Kruse
said...

I’m afraid we have gone past the crossroads. To recover we would have to turn around and go back. The church has never been a guiding light for the rich and powerful who are actually leading. It has served as cover for them, or has been in collusion with them, but has never been them. These days in particular, but as always to some degree, people do not follow pastors; certainly not when they are headed to the cross. Looking at history over thousands of years, it becomes clear that politics and religion ARE separate. Religious people should not become political leaders because they will cease to be religious, and politicians should not be motivated by religion because they will be theocrats. You cannot serve both God and mammon. Jesus never exerted power over the political process or even tried to influence it. He didn’t even write down what he was saying. He didn’t challenge the repressive regimes of his day. He was executed by politicians at the behest of theocrats pretending to defend God. The politician didn’t want to do it, and a true lover of God wouldn’t have done it, but because the two were intertwined, they did it. The religious Right was not so political until the rich and powerful got the bright idea to propagandize them. History and evolution both make it clear that life seldom if ever backtracks to correct itself. It just adds on another fix on top of all the other fixes until the system crashes of its own weight or complexity. This experiment called the US Constitution has come to an apparent dead end, and we can only hope and pray that another path is found somewhere up ahead.